• The New Yorker; Journal News [Westchester County], Thursday, October 22, 2009 10:38 AM

Rebecca Mead sat down for lunch at chef Daniel Boulud's trendy DB Bistro http://www.danielnyc.com/dbbistro.html with Michael Silverstein, a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group, recently. Between some heavyweight name dropping and comparison of Bikram-yoga studios in key consulting hubs across the U.S., they chatted about one of our favorite topics: "What do women want?"

Silverstein, who has just written Women Want More: How to Capture Your Share of the World's Largest, Fastest-Growing Market with Kate Sayre, says that women want to be Swedish, Mead concludes. That's because there is virtually no gender discrimination in Sweden.

"The Swedish woman says, 'We have a house here, but we have something in the country that we go to when we take off the month of July together; my husband goes out and hunts for dinner,'" Silverstein tells Mead. "He comes back with dinner, and he has shot it! They are happy. American women don't have anyone hunting for them -- that's the real problem."

Sounds similar to the problems indentified by psychologist Carin Rubenstein in her recently published The Superior Wife Syndrome: Why Women Do Everything So Well and Why -- for the Sake of Our Marriages - We've Got to Stop. Rubenstein tells the Journal News' Linda Lombroso that many married women are stuck managing the household, the children, the pets and the social life as their husbands coast along, not wanting "to think," happy with the ride.

"I'm cooking the dinner, doing a million things at once, and he's on the couch reading the paper," Rubenstein relates. "And I'll say, 'Can you let the dog out?' as in 'Open the door,' and he'll say, in a huff, 'I have to do everything.' It's like a joke, but it's got a lot of layers of meaning, that joke."

Like go shoot your own dinner, whydoncha? Works for me.

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